The IT Channel Planet reports
that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue
within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over
2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security
and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through
George Dearing on Twitter.

Three of the growth markets are project
and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration
(CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue
to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0.
It is encouraging to see these numbers,

It is interesting to note that the
collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS
adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82
percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform
vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow. 

A few months ago I covered
Jackbe’s preview of this release (see JackBe Provides Enterprise Mashup Platform on the Cloud and Previews
Presto 3.0).  Now it has become available
and I spoke with John Crupi, CTO and Chris Warner, VP of Marketing about their
new 3.0 release.  Two of the main additions
are a platform for creating internal Enterprise App Stores, as well as a robust
visual toolset for creating secure Enterprise Apps.

First, we discussed the Enterprise App Store.  This is modeled after the very
successful and well-known iTunes store but it takes the functionality inside
the enterprise as a means of governance more that a commercial distribution
channel. I like the use of the App Store concept, as people are very familiar
with it. The platform allows enterprise consumers of apps a single source that
is well organized and searchable. It also offers the creators of apps a central
place to share their efforts within the enterprise.  Here is a sample App Store screen.

There is an App Store Manager responsible for
ensuring the Apps have function, documentation and work as advertised. . The
review and approval process provides central governance that can be very useful
given the ease in which apps can be powered by mashups.  This is a way to avoid the potential
chaos of too many apps and redundant apps. You can better get the right apps to
the right users with some degree of vetting along the way.  The apps can be out-of-the-box
creations, as well as templates requiring further customization.  Here is a App Store Manager screen.

The App Store has an area called ‘My Apps’ where users
can place and organize the Apps they want and use. They can provide comments;
tag and share the Apps. This information accelerates the ability for other
users to find and use the Apps they want. Here is a sample My Apps screen

JackBe has also upgraded their development tools
with this release. Their new visual tools make it easier for non-developers to
create enterprise apps and deploy them to enterprise destination like portals,
SharePoint, iGoogle, and mobile devices. Presto 3.0 includes enhancement to Wires, their visual
mashup-making tool, Mashboard,
a new App assembly and wiring tool, and Mashup
Sites for SharePoint, an advanced SharePoint add-on that mashes
SharePoint Lists and publishes Apps as SharePoint WebParts.

They showed me some apps created with these new
tools. One set were developed by a non-technical marketing person and covered
the World Cup. There was an amusing comparison of goals per capita and goals vs.
GDP for the competing countries. These applications took minutes to create
without programming using publically available data.

I especially liked the new Mashhboard that allows
users to group or link apps along a workflow. The creations can run on any
browser, on the iPad, or even within Excel. The approach is to make everything
simple: creation, distribution selection, and implementation.  Mashups are one of the key building
blocks of enterprise 2.0 and it is nice to see these new features to streamline
the process. Here is a Mashboard screen.

JackBe will also be making a cloud-based Developer
Edition of Presto 3.0 available to all members of its Mashup Developer
Community. Registration in the Community is free and includes tutorials,
samples, and support forums. 

According to a new Forrester report, The
Next Wave of Office
Productivity
by Sheri McLeish with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang, Microsoft Office
continues to dominate both in the enterprise and at home to no surprise.
However, changes are affecting enterprise productivity strategies, such as Web
2.0, enterprise 2.0, and the consumerization of IT. Many enterprise workers use
products like the iPhone and YouTube at home and they have expectations at work
for similar functionality either through these tools or enterprise versions. As
a loyal Mac. iTunes, and iPhone user who is still attached to Office, I was
interested in where all these tools are going and appreciated getting a review
copy of the report.

The report indicated that though most
enterprises have long-term plans to continue using Office, alternative
productivity tools will remain in the mix by leveraging the tools employees
access for do-it-yourself technologies, such as those through mobile devices and
the cloud. These evolving productivity tools will help enterprises transform to
a fit-to-purpose approach to productivity, establishing the foundation for the
next wave of productivity that's focused on aligning tools with employee needs.
In the words of the report, “The next wave of productivity will see
today’s innovations dissolve into expected features, creating integrated touch points
for content-related activities tailored to fit a business purpose or workforce
segment.”

They pointed out that the
recent recession has driven interest in free or low-cost alternatives to
Microsoft Office and has slowed upgrade plans. In the past year OpenOffice.org
has seen a modest uptake by enterprises and is now supported by nearly 10% of
the organizations Forrester surveyed. Similarly,
cloud-based email from providers like Google is finding traction as a
lower-cost alternative to Exchange. I covered the email wars
recently (see: Email Wars Heat
Up in the Cloud). Google’e move caused Microsoft to drop its prices.

Another factor is the growing interest
business process integration and automation, another topic I have discussed
here (see for example: Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process).
As enterprises increasingly use collaboration platforms like SharePoint and the
best of breed players, they will (or should) increasingly seek to integrate business
content and processes in an effort to move from simple content storage to
content workflows. I see this as what needs to be done to really make use of
the enterprise 2.0 approach and tools. In a similar way, the only successful KM
efforts were aligned to work processes.

There is much more in
the report and I found it very useful. 
For example, the majority of people surveyed as a background for the
report viewed alternatives to Microsoft Office as complementary, rather than
replacements. In this light, many tools, including Microsoft Office 2010, are
adding social computing capabilities. Other tools such as those from Google, IBM,
and Novell are moving in the same direction. 

I have written
about MindTouch several times (see for example: MindTouch 2009
Provides Enhanced Development Platform for Rich Collaborative Applications). I
recently spoke again with Aaron Fulkerson, their Co-Founder and CEO, on MindTouch 2010. First we set some context for
this latest release.

MindTouch was
first released in 2006 as an Open Source wiki-based platform. The initial goal
was to attract users and this has been achieved with over a l million users in
hundreds of thousands of installations. In 2008 MindTouch began to sell support
subscriptions. Then in 2009 they released a commercial version that sits on top
of the free Open Source core. They discovered that many users were building
product and service documentation with the MindTouch platform.  These strategic efforts were used to
engage potential customers, retain them, and increase cost savings through greater
self-service.  The decision was
made to create MindTouch 2010 to provide greater capability through an
intelligent platform for this growing use case.  I think it was a wise decision.

As Aaron
describes in a recent Forbes article, The
Evolution Of User Manuals, product and service documentation has evolved from a
tactical cost center to a revenue generating strategic tool. The advent of
online documentation has learned with this transformation.  Now you can apply SEO to the
documentation to proactively attract potential customers and MindTouch has done
this. You can also track their pathway through the documentation to determine
their areas of interest and offer appropriate solutions, another area that
MindTouch supports. 

Aaron writes that some
companies that he has spoken to report that their documentation brings in over
50% of qualified leads. He also notes that in his own company receives 70% plus
of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more
than half of our overall site traffic. In addition, over half of their lead
generation is driven by our documentation.

I can certainly believe this as I have seen similar
results. This applies to both self-service documentation and that which
supports call center reps. For example, is one company I worked with, the reps who
made full use of the supporting product and service documentation were three
times more likely to cross sell, moving from a below industry average achieved
by the non-users to an above industry average for the documentation users.

MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to
support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for
authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content:

To support authoring MindTouch
2010 offers a multi-user, XML-driven editing platform that supports all rich
media types. Users are able to publish in-a-click from commonly used desktop
tools. The Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) ensures data portability. They also
offer templates and Aaron walked me through some of these. A tutorial template
not only provided short cuts but also offered good instructional format
suggestions.  Here is a sample opening
page offering templates.

 To support discovery MindTouch
2010 publishes content in a web-based format, dynamically generating navigation
from content semantics and including effective search engine optimization
tools. The enterprise-ready Adaptive Search engine delivers increasingly high
quality results by learning from your users’ behavior.

Content curation is
great new capability. To support this MindTouch 2010
introduces some targeted curation analytics. Customers can analyze their
documentation by quality, aging and customer behavior in aggregate or by
specific topics.  You can use
out-of the-box reports can create custom versions. Here are two sample reports
covering aging and rating..

Aaron showed me a few client examples. Autodesk
provides CAD software. They had a large user base. So they provided a MindTouch
powered set of educational services. Based on participants’ interest, they now
can cross sell through the educational materials.  The pilot was very successful and now they are rolling the
offering across all products. This is a clever approach.

I like what they are doing. It is a great example
of a company listening to its users to identify an expanding market
opportunity.  They not only
listened well but also provided some useful new capabilities to serve this use
case.

I recently received a review copy of a useful new
Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email
Business
by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from
the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco – and indicates that
Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in
Ted’s words from the executive summary.

“Google jumped into
the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud
email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated
and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM
launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco
purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for
$5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since
beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services.
Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at
least on the checklist items.”

Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I
missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from
Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both
Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something
that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.

Over
the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email
strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies
pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a
nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly
cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.

Forrester also expects
that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and
functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration
features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull
information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki;
messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.”  This is good news and another alignment
with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the
collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so
this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by
the email provider. 

PBworks has now launched its
PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as
Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with
customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at
PBworks about this new offering that
they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration. This new term indicate
support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through
CRM.

Retrevo
does some interesting surveys that I have covered before. Their new Gadget
Census study pits the following U.S. cities against each other to see who has
the most consumer electronics per capita. This census was conducted online from March, 2010
through July, 2010 and received over 7,500 individual responses from Retrevo
users distributed across gender, age, and location.

1.
San Francisco vs. New York

San
Francisco has more Online TVs (12% more)

San
Francisco has more Mac OS computers (94% more)

San
Francisco has more iPhones (23% more)

New
York has 56% more BlackBerries than San Francisco

New
York has 30% more iPads than San Francisco

New
York has 34% more e-Readers than San Francisco

2.
Boston vs. L.A.

Boston:
44% more BlackBerries

Boston:
43% more e-Readers

L.A.:
11% more iPhones

L.A.:
54% more Mac OS computers

L.A.:
24% more game consoles

L.A.:
16% more Blu-ray players

3.
Washington D.C. vs. Chicago

Washington
D.C.: 53% more Blackberries

Washington
D.C.: 50% more e-Readers

Chicago:
23% more Macs

Chicago.:
45% more people streaming music

Chicago.:
66% more people with more than 3 TVs

So
the East coast seems the winner in BlackBerries and e-Readers. The West coast
has more Macs and iPhones. LA plays a lot of games and Chicago watches a lot of
TV. Now I am counter culture as I live in Boston and have a Mac and an iPhone. 

I
have covered SkillSoft before as they were moving in this direction (see SkillSoft Introduces More Web 2.0 Features with
SkillPort® 7.0 Learning Management System). Now SkillSoft has announced the launch
of inGenius, a social learning platform layer that enables
customers to securely enable their employees to find, create and share
knowledge assets and expertise with their colleagues as they leverage the
extensive SkillSoft library of on-demand learning assets. I was very interested
in this new move so I spoke with Pam Boiros of SkillSoft about
their offering.

Pam first went through several trends that helped
to prompt them to make this move. 
Learning has become more social and the interest in peer learning has
increased. I certainly agree with these observations. I have always been a
proponent of social and peer learning through such methods as simulation-based
learning going back to the 80s. It is great to see the rise of social computing
providing a much richer platform for this approach. 

There is also the move from learning as an event
to learning as a continuous process. This was one of the reasons I first got
involved in knowledge management in the 90s and now the line between learning
and KM is becoming even more blurred for good reasons.

To address these trends and take advantage of the
new capabilities that social computing and social networks can bring to
learning, SkillSoft’s Books24×7 division introduced inGenius. It enables social
learning by extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the
knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. Unlike many
stand-alone social networking applications, inGenius is built on SkillSoft’s Books24×7
on demand content collections containing more than 25,000 titles — digital books from leading publishers, analyst
research reports, and white papers — as well as 1,300 videos of thought
leaders and practitioners. Below you can see a inGenius home page.

inGenius
enhances SkillSoft’s core learning assets with a feature set that enables
learners to leverage content assets as seeds of discussion and to add community
content (“co-content”) including notes, comments and ratings that add a unique
layer of context and relevance, specific to their organization. It further
enhances the social learning experience with opportunities to build connections
and allow sharing between learners. inGenius also enables learners to discover
knowledgeable colleagues by searching social profiles. Here is sample profile
page.

inGenius
is a free add-on to the Books24×7 offering. People can set up their own profile with recommended titles and
comments on works. They also have implemented the following model used by
Twitter so people can see the activities of those they respect. The activity
stream contains auto-generated updates based on activities such as adding
comments, rather than manually created tweets. You can click on a link in the
update to see the actual comment in the context of the relevant learning
material. I think this is a good approach for their content focused approach.
Here is a sample activity stream.

When
you do searches for content you now get additional returns on the people who
have commented on this content or recommended it, putting a great social
context to search, another good move. The addition of social
networking capabilities to a learning library makes great sense and SkillSoft
has done a great job with this release.

Here is a software innovation that is
potentially transformational.  I
have long been interested in providing support to knowledge intense business
processes. This was my first exposure to what became knowledge management in
the early 90s and the concept behind many useful enterprise 2.0
implementations. Now OpenSpan is going beyond mashups to provide quick to
create interconnections between applications to automate many aspects of
business processes. As a result users have more time to focus on the decisions
within these processes.  These
automations can also create substantial time savings to drive significant ROI.

I recently spoke with Rick Marquardt and
Francis Carden of OpenSpan about their offering. OpenSpan's User Process
Management software provides an intuitive visual design environment for
automating user processes within and across applications without requiring APIs
or changes to the application's code. They have figured out a way to get inside
the application even if it does not contain an API for this task. Developers
have the ability to integrate Windows, cloud/SaaS and custom legacy
applications, which enables organizations to improve user efficiency while
extending the ROI of existing applications.

With OpenSpan organizations can go inside any
application a user accesses, monitor user interactions to understand how power
users operate and then automate processes to streamline these actions. Building these automations
to connect applications is a drag and drop process as Rick and Francis
demonstrated to me. Below you can see an example of making connections between
a CRM application and an Order Entry system. This can eliminate the current out
dated practice of cut and paste between apps to automate fill-ins.

 
Open Span can also monitor user activity to
help determine which processes to automate and what applications to connect. In
addition to reducing steps, this can also reduce the number of windows on a
user’s desktop. Using the OpenSpan Events desktop monitoring
technology, you can record every step in every user’s workflow, 24×7x365. It is
no longer necessary to conduct sample time and motion studies or view screen
recordings to try and guess what's happening. You can get the user’s detailed desktop
interactions in real time for accurate monitoring. This can both help target
where to automate and then track the ROI from these efforts. I have been
involved in a number of call center monitoring efforts so I have first hand
appreciation of the value of this capability. Below is a sample screen.

 
OpenSpan is now offering a free download of
their IDE, OpenSpan Studio or the Plug-In for Visual Studio. Built on an
embedded version of the Microsoft Visual Studio Framework, the plug-in can be
used with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and makes OpenSpan functionality
available for the first time via a .NET API. This means that developers can now
access all of OpenSpan's runtime capabilities directly from code and mix and
match .NET and OpenSpan projects in a single executable. OpenSpan has decided
to make the tools available free and focus their commercial fees on providing
the run time to support automations the developers create. I think this is a
smart move. It reduces any financial risk until a solution is created that
demonstrates value.

To further support developers OpenSpan has
created the OpenSpan Developer Community. It offers  extensive resources, including a code gallery, knowledge base
and forum for collaborating with other developers. This is another smart move
as the objective is to empower developers with increased capability to create
applications that use the OpenSpan runtime. The OpenSpan Developer Community is
seen below.

 
I asked how this goes beyond mashups as they
have a similar objective. Mashups generally only draw data from multiple sources.
While this is certainly an improvement in application development, OpenSpan
also can perform transactions within these applications by getting completely
inside the applications. This can even work with third party applications. I
watched OpenSpan connect a FedEx tracking system with an internal order
processing application with only the requirement of gaining user access to the
FedEx Web app, not developer access. Rick said that their clients have seen
dramatic improvements in business process execution. I can believe this. As I
said at the beginning this could be transformational. 

I have written about
CubeTree several times. The most recent was Cubetree engages its user community in product development. I also met a number of their executives at the last
year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference so I was interested to learn that they have
recently been acquired by SuccessFactors,
another firm I have covered (see SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management). SuccessFactors is one of the
world’s most widely deployed cloud-based business solutions. It is used by more
than 8 million people within over 3,000 companies.

Recently, I spoke with Carlin Wiegner, the CubeTree
CEO, about the impact of this acquisition and how CubeTree will fit within
SuccessFactors.  First, he said
that this move is opening a many more doors for them given the large installed
base, new use cases in areas such as learning, and a larger sales force that
SuccessFactors offers.  There is
also great synergy between the two offerings. SuccessFactors has recently
broadened their offering with the BizX performance management system that
offers more robust support for knowledge workers.

The addition of Cubetree can take this BizX support
to the next level with its many collaboration features. Individuals can quickly
create rich profiles and begin engaging with others in their organization to
get work done, find co-workers who can help, and share insights as they happen. Teams
can make use of workspaces that
enable groups to immediately gather around a project, collaborate, share
documents and perform work tasks. Ciubetree also
provides executive dashboards that offer insights into
how a company is executing on a day-to-day basis. 

CubeTree will remain a
separate brand as SucessFactors wanted CubeTree’s capabilities to both extend
its own offerings and as an independent, but well aligned, offering.  For example, the SuccessFactor employee
profile will now have CubeTree’s related communication and collaboration
activities embedded within it. 
Other aspects of CubeTree will findtheir way into the appropriate
SuccessFactors offerings. The CubeTree micro-blogging feature will be embedded
within SuccessFactors but also remain a separate free offering. 

Below is a sample screen
from the micro-blogging feature. In this case you see a status update "in
progress" where an employee is letting his co-workers know that he has
wrapped up his current project and where he will be if they need him for the
rest of the day. The CubeTree micro-blogging
capability also integrates with Twitter. Below we see the same employee sending a notice
about the release notes post to a customer who had a question about new
features in this weeks release. By adding a custom hash tag (#cubetree) to his
Twitter update it is posted to his CubeTree feed. He then adds a comment back
that he is pushing it live on the blog.

CubeTree provides
micro-blogging as a free feature and the other capabilities comes in a
commercial package. I think this is a smart move as micro-blogging is the
perfect way to introduce your offerings within an enterprise. It is easy to
install and does not require integration with business process to obtain
initial benefits. It can then be spread virally throughout an enterprise to
quickly demonstrate value.

I also asked Carlin about
what new features that CubeTree has introduced since our last conversation.
They do frequent releases for continuous improvement but one of the main areas
they have focused on is more robust email integration. CubeTree can work with
any email client as it is not a plug in. Instead it sends messages that appear
to the email client like any other message. This allows users to stay within
email for many CubeTree activities. You can also have very robust email alert
settings that can be easily turned on and off. Below you can see some of the
robust email settings.

To complement the email
integration there is also very robust mobile capabilities. Below you can see a
message on a mobile device. The user is replying to an instant
notification and posting it back to CubeTree

I like this combination
as SuccessFactors and CubeTree nicely complement each other without bring
redundancies to sort out.  Carlin
said they sorted through several possible mergers. I do not know the other
possibilities but I think they made a good choice.